Give me “chicken dump truck” and extra large “worried” as desert.
I’m going with “A luxury sofa” thank you
Thank you, Hummus.
Not a problem
“Tuna is a problem” is my fave.
Mine too!
I prefer the one in the secret menu,
“We Need To Talk About Tuna”.
I would have fun at a place like this. Just order a different item each time I go and see what the hell it actually is.
We need an Engrish magazine on this here Fediverse. Beans, Gentlemen!
Some (if not a lot) of the original menu must’ve been misspelled, right?
No, I speak Arabic and it’s not so much misspelling as like, lack of sufficient punctuation. Then that is directly thrown into a translator. I’ll use the word مشكل as an example and try to explain why the menu says ‘Tuna is a problem’. As letters, from right to left, they are l:
m - م (the first letter on the right) sh - ش k - ك L - ل (last letter on the left)
I know those standalone letters look different but that’s how they are when they’re not conjoined to other letters.
Anyway the problem is that that word can be read multiple ways because a lot of the vowels in Arabic come from small modifiers that no one can be bothered to type out because we know how to infer the pronunciations in context. So let’s get into the conflation of the word here. Without any vowels, theoretically the word can be read as mshkl. One way to read the word مشكل can be MuSHaKKal, and with the modifiers it would look like so:
مُشَكْل
It’s not easy to see but the first 3 letters have modifiers that make them be pronounced as ‘Mu’, ‘Sha’, ‘K~’, ‘Al’. Pronouncing the word this way means ‘mixed’ i.e. the dish being served is Mixed Tuna AKA Tuna salad.
Now without the modifiers the word can be read as: مشكِل
Now theres no modifier on the second letter so it kind of just blends into the first, becoming pronounced as ‘Mush’, ‘Kill’, or ‘mash’, ‘kal’. This word literally translates to ‘problem’. And with if you just put a noun before problem, it makes sense grammatically to infer that the noun is the problem. Ergo,
“Tuna is a problem”. Also known as Tuna salad.
Very informative. Thank you for being here!
Glad to be! Got that “why bother no one’s gonna read this anyway” feeling halfway through the comment but then remembered I wasn’t on reddit anymore
I’m late to the thread but I just wanted to say THANK YOU for taking the time to write it all up! You’ve helped me understand a few things about abjads, which makes the original post even more hilarious.
Thank you for reading and enjoying! Yeah the great thing is that most of the ridiculous things in that menu have similar explanations, some are complete nonsense though
Beans, Gentlemen
I assume they’re fun silly names in Arabic too?
no, I’m not an Arab but i can read a little bit and from what i can read they’re just regular dishes. the auto translator went crazy with interpretations though. part of the problem is Arabic script doesn’t really have vowels; they have diciacritics instead but they’re rarely used (either for disambiguation or in the Quran to minimize the possibility of misreading the holy text). so imagine reading English without vowels:
y cn prbbl tll frm cntxt wht ths mns
but it would be hard for a machine to decipher it. these words can easily be:
yea cone probable tall farm context wheat these mines
once you misinterpret one word, its relation to the other words make them more likely to be misinterpreted as well.
Yeah, we’ve had Liver with cheese, but wjat about Liver liver with cheese?
Liver liver is exponentially more liver.
Blindfolded, ordinary is my fave 😋
I am more of a foul white jar guy
Same. I like to start with A Period of Cream first, though
They always look weird at me when i order a luxury sofa, like “You gonna eat that whole thing?” And I tell them “Yeah!”. They always end up totally confused!
Ate a “she is suspicious of cheese” last night. Would recommend.
Well now I’m just confused.
Beans, gentlemen
Glad to see I’m not the only one suspicious of cheese
